Culture of inclusion

At Strauss Group, we believe that inclusive business practices empower our employees, foster innovation, build trustful relationships throughout our supply chain and improve our responsiveness to our customers and consumers, enabling us to achieve better business results over the long term in the right way. Inclusion for us represents both a business necessity and a core belief and is the result of respect, valuing others and caring about the lives we touch through the thousands of people we employ and the millions of people we reach each day through our products and our operations.

In Israel, over the past few years, we have been increasingly targeting our efforts to embrace a broader level of diversity and inclusion, beyond our efforts in advancing gender equality. This includes increasing the representation in our business of employees from the Arab community in Israel, specifically in professional and office-based roles at our HQ. For example, in 2018, the events we organized around International Women’s Day included employee Ted-style talks on the subject of equal opportunity in relation to minority groups or people with disabilities. Employees from these groups shared their experiences and inspired others to understand the challenges and needs of all employees and advance inclusion in our workplace.

Championing gender equality

We remain committed to gender equality, advancing women in leadership positions across Strauss Group. We work to embed a culture of equal opportunity and motivate managers to promote gender diversity for the benefit of the business, our employees and for society overall. In 2011, we counted 36% of women in management positions and in 2018, this has risen to 43% (39% including our JV operation in Brazil). Nevertheless, despite significant efforts, we find that increasing the number of women in management positions remains challenging, and we therefore extended our objective of achieving 50% of women in management roles by 2024, rather than by 2020.

In 2018, we continued to support gender equality programs such as our work group that advances gender awareness among men employees and our woman-to-woman mentoring program for women in pre-management roles. We also continue to provide a platform for a group of 14 women, sponsored by our Chairperson, who are driving change through specific initiatives, for example, adapting working conditions to address the needs of observant religious women. Also, in 2018, as every year, we celebrated International Women’s Day with a series of awareness and engagement events around the organization